It's a portmanteau of "nigh" and "Siren."  

Two of the three Autobot Small Headmasters differed between North America and Japan -- Hosehead was no different from Cab, Nightbeat was drastically different from Minerva, and Siren was... sort of different from Goshooter.  While Siren's toy was a gray and blue fire chief car, Goshooter was a white and blue police car.  Thing is, when Siren appeared in the Marvel Comics back in the 80s, his grays were rendered as white, so in my brain there is very little difference between the two.  Marvel Comics Siren is what inhabits me, and so when I see Goshooter, I think "oh, hey, Siren."  

So I was all over this new Japan-exclusive version of Goshooter made from Generations Nightbeat.  (Another wrinkle in all this is that the Marvel comics swapped head designs for Nightbeat and Siren, meaning Nightbeat's head is pretty damn appropriate for a Goshooter toy.)   Goshooter was the winner of a magazine poll that offered ten redeco concepts -- other possibilities included Alpha Trion from Scourge, the Omnibots from various Universe/Generations toys, Beast Wars Silverbolt from Beast Hunters Grimwing, and crazily enough The Fallen from Fall of Cybertron Onslaught.  All of these concepts showed up in the magazine's manga, including The Fallen, who combined with and controlled the Fall of Cybertron Wreckers.  Of all of these, I was hoping for Goshooter the most, so I could use him as Siren, and the universe ultimately smiled upon me.  I mean, I wouldn't have turned down another The Fallen, but I have plenty of The Fallens and only the original Siren, who is an immobile giant thing.  

Goshooter comes with Shuta Go, a redeco of Blazemaster meant to represent Goshooter's human pilot.  I figure he can hang out with Daniel and Stylor.  

Goshooter is extravagently decoed, though it has some trouble dealing with the unpaintable nylon plastic that makes up part of the car shell, resulting in some incongruous blue patches.  Also, my particular Goshooter is pretty floppy in the ankles, and so at times he has trouble standing.  Otherwise, he completes my desire for new toys of the Small Headmasters, along with my Nightbeat (with new chest I got from Shapeways) and Hosehead (who's really a Hot Spot with an altered head).  All three are on the Lost Light in More Than Meets The Eye, so that's more crewmembers for that display, too.  

Hooray!  Goshooter and/or Siren!  

 

This next wave of Transformers Generations is some crazy shit.  Nightbeat and Jhiaxus, who are really awesome guys who rarely get toys?  Windblade, the bestest new character?  And the guy in the wave I'm least interested in is somehow Crosscut, who's a new toy of a previously e-Hobby exclusive guy?  It's like Hasbro was throwing darts at a dartboard composed entirely of stuff I really dig.  

Let's talk about Nightbeat.  He's a retool of Generations Bumblebee and his retool Goldfire Bumblebee, so this means he's the third use of the mold and the third head for it.  (There'll be a fourth head on a fifth use of the mold next year.)  He almost was made from Reveal the Shield Jazz, which so almost happened that art of that version is on the cover of the comic book Nightbeat comes with.  RTS Jazz is a much better toy (one of the best), but this version made from Bumblebee looks more like Nightbeat in robot mode.  The original Nightbeat was a Porsche, just like Jazz, so RTS Jazz woulda been perfect in vehicle mode.  A muscle car feels a little off.

Nightbeat's in the colors you'd expect him to be -- he's a bright cyan and yellow, grounded by black.  All of his yellow is painted, and the toy valiantly tries to cover up blue plastic with yellow paint.  It mostly succeeds, surprisingly, but there are a few thinly covered parts that look a little greenish.  Nightbeat's new head has lightpiping, but it's painted over in red on both sides.   This time Nightbeat's shins are glued into place so that you can no longer slide them out laterally for robot mode.  Perhaps there were stability or looseness issues?  

There's a way to transform Nightbeat so his shoulder kibble hangs in a way that suggests Nightbeat more -- a transformation alteration that Japan is using for their upcoming Goshooter exclusive.  Just, uh, keep his shoulders untransformed, basically, losing the door wings and keeping them hanging off his biceps.  

His weapon is still ridiculous.  It's Bumblebee/Goldbug's, but every time this toy comes out again with that same weapon, I feel like its ridiculousness increases.  

I kinda wish Nightbeat had gotten a newly sculpted chest in addition to his head.  I also wish he'd gotten to have an orange face.  Yellow is way better than silver like everyone else, but it's not strictly accurate.  However, Nightbeat's face is yellow in the ongoing IDW comics, so maybe that's where that comes from.  

Speaking of which, I strongly need a Nautica for him to solve mysteries with.  

I might as well lump the other two uses of the Jazz mold here in one post.

The first, Shattered Glass Treadshot, I talked about a little already when the toy was first revealed.  He's an homage to a 2004 Treadshot toy which was pitted against an Ultra Magnus toy.  That Treadshot was a maroon redeco of Armada Sideswipe, and true to Shattered Glass's oft-repeated theme of rivals in each other's color schemes, this Treadshot is in Armada Sideswipe's colors.

Let's all take a moment to appreciate the fact that this BotCon toy is not only an Armada homage but, as he's a Treadshot paired off against an Ultra Magnus, also an homage to a 2004 Universe box set.  This is insane.

I like to think that this Treadshot IS that Treadshot, and that they are the same dude, and so I tried to find a way to get this Treadshot to interact with that Treadshot's Mini-Con partner, Nightbeat.  Treadshot has no Powerlinx connectors, and so I thought I was stuck with just balancing Nightbeat's motorcyle mode on his back or something.  But then I remembered Treadshot's speakers combine with his rifle to make a larger gun, and thought I could do something with that.  And I did.  And it sort of works.  I call it "The Chopper."

Treadshot was in the preregistration box set, but the other use of the Jazz mold was one of the at-show toys.  It was Kick-Off, and he's an Action Master!  BotCon has given us one Action Master recreation every year since 2009, and this is something I never complain about.  And I certainly wouldn't complain about Kick-Off!  I mean, I don't have a lot of feelings for Kick-Off in general, but this toy of him is amaaaaaazing.  And also frustrating.  Amazingly frustrating.  Let me tell you why.

He has florescent orange.  Or blacklight orange.  Whatever you want to call it.  That stripe that runs down the middle of his car mode is painted florescent orange.  And it is SO FRICKING BEAUTIFUL.  But it won't photograph.  I don't think RGB can do florescent.  And if it can, I sure can't figure out how.  This means when I try to share him with you via photography, he instead turns out looking kinda dreary.  But it is FANTASTIC, YOU GUYS, BELIEVE ME.

His forearms and weapons are molded in a bright orange I like to call "Action Master orange."  Lots of Action Masters got stuff molded or painted in this color, like Optimus Prime's detailing and weapons and Shockwave's accent colors.  It was the early 90s, after all.  If my childhood nostalgia could be embodied in a specific color, Action Master orange would be it.   And so with the florescent orange and the Action Master orange are coupled with black and white and a little red, it results in a crazy-awesome toy.

But one I can't photograph accurately, god dammit.

I am sitting here all grrrrrrrrrr.

First of all, yay!  Mid-Ohio Con is this coming weekend.  Saturday and Sunday, I believe?  October 22-23rd! That is good news!  The bad news is Book 4 won't be in the States quite yet.  The big pile o' books isn't expected to reach Columbus until the first week of November... if customs doesn't flag it for being terrorism, that is.  We'll see.  But I will have Roomies! book 1 and Shortpacked! books 2 and 3, as always.  I will have an extremely limited number of Dina hats.  And finally more Dinobot "Honor" posters came in, so phew.

The bummer part is I have a big pile of deaths to announce!  Two hamsters within the past week (mommy ham and "Pirate" ham), and on Friday my grandfather passed away after suffering from Alzheimer's for a very long while.  His body finally caught up with his mind.  You'd think, since he hasn't recognized me in about over a year, that this would be easier to handle, but it still stings surprisingly.  So this Wednesday and Thursday I'll be off in Indiana for the visitation and funeral.

We have one remaining hamster from our current batch.  She used to be the most skittish and wild one, but once mommy disappeared from her cage she just sits there, depressed.  We can even pet her now, which was a near impossibility before.  She just takes it, like she's given up.  This is definitely not helping my mood.

Anyway, enjoy this image of two Nightbeats powerlinxing incestuously.

Here's my completed Shattered Glass Nightbeat!  Finally I got the rest of the flames off the doors.  What's my secret?  Well, uh, I realized there was some extremely fine sandpaper in the paint box.  I misstook it for wax paper for the longest time, but I realized one side was a little rough, and I went to town on the doors.  Well, not really "to town."  I just had to get rid of the rest of the lingering flame deco shadow.  That shit was stubborn.

(And no, by "extremely fine" I don't mean I "went to town" on it.)

So, you know.  Some paint happened, after all that was done.  Most of the paint was extremely easy.  I mean, it's just flat black.  That shit paints itself.  It's that damn yellow mohawk I needed to paint that gave me trouble.  I must have tried that thing a billion times.  Yellow paint sucked.  Finally, I found my silver Sharpie, used that as a base coat, and then the yellow paint stopped just puddling off like Nightbeat was in the shower.  Still wasn't thick enough to actually make it look like the bright yellow it's supposed to be, but whatever.  It's done.

Jin Saotome was gracious in instructing me in how to put his decals on.  It was forever ago that Shawn Tessmann, the BotCon customizer guy, told me how these things work.  So Jin gave me a ringy-dingy, told me what's what, and the that was done.  ...at like 3 in the morning.  I keep late nights.  Mirrorverse Nightbeat was finally completed!

...until the next morning when I remembered that Cosmic Rust infections were part of his deco.  That was a few more hours.

Anyway, this is Shattered Glass Nightbeat.  There were some speedbumps, like when I had to cannibalize him some of Energon Hot Shot's knee/roofs because the alcohol crumbled the originals.  And the whole flame deco removal thing.  But I think he came out pretty nice, in the end.  And because most of him isn't paint, since he's just black detail on an unpainted toy, he transforms back and forth pretty seamlessly.  (It helps that, unlike the Animated Minerva I put together myself at BotCon 2011's customization class, this toy was put together by Chinese workers.  So it actually fits together well, and wasn't assembled by a moron.)

Hooray!  That's the only version of a Hot Shot toy I didn't own.   Cross that off my bucket list!

So I've been sitting on this extra Club Nightbeat for a few years, meaning to eventually kitbash it into Shattered Glass Nightbeat.  What's kept me from doing it for so long is that there was paint removal required, and after removing paint from Obsidian to make Rotorbolt, I felt confident in the procedure.

After all, the most important thing to remove is the tampos, right?  Those came right off Obsidian, no probs!  Like wiping spilled soup off the table.  If the normal paint doesn't come off, that's fine, since SG Nightbeat just needs to paint over everything with black.  It's just the flames on the doors that have to go before I can start painting him.

So I throw Nightbeat into a vat of alcohol.  It took Obsidian about 24 hours before anything began to fall off of him.  But 12 hours later, all of Nightbeat's paint is wiping off.  And, grargh, you guessed it, his flames remained.  Well, okay.  I took most of Nightbeat out, kept the doors in the alcohol and... it's been three days, I think, and I'm still trying to get rid of those stupid flames.  I have a brush and I have some paper towels, but the only tool that's making headway is my own fingernail.

It's quite infuriating.

Oh and apparently the alcohol made his translucent knee-roofs brittle and they broke.  But that is absolutely fine.  Really, it is.  As you can imagine with an owner of a Hot Shot Shrine, I have an extra Energon Hot Shot or two.  I'll just repaint and swap out those translucent pieces, no big.

Still.  Grrarghghglglgglllghrg.